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(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
Brent Bozell examined some recent examples in his syndicated column, interviews given by Walter Cronkite and Bob Simon, the Middle East reporter for CBS.
Cronkite appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live program, offering the view that “very definitely U.S. foreign policy could have caused” the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last Sept. 11. Why? Because, says Cronkite, “We represent the rich,” while most Africans, Asians and Latin Americans are “very, very poor. The people in these countries don’t have adequate housing, don’t have adequate hospitalization, don’t have adequate medical care, don’t have adequate education. They are not going to live forever in the shadow of the riches that we display constantly in our movies, in our travels around the world, in our airlines, in our shipping. They are not going to put up with that forever.”
Simon argued similarly, stating that if we were “less greedy, taking better care of our poor and our needy, and stop making impossible demands on our planet’s resources, I think we would plunge our enemies into shame.”
Bozell pointed out the flaws in this strange logic, noting that “most of the 9-11 hijackers came from wealthy Saudi families,” and that if “a massive redistribution of wealth is the solution, why isn’t the terrorists’ own home, Saudi Arabia, and its immense riches, the problem?”
Bull’s eye. But we are left with another question: Why do liberals feel this guilt? Why do they blame America first? The usual explanation is that it can be attributed to a feeling of unworthiness over their financial good fortune, a way of demonstrating their sensitivity to the poor and racial minorities. It is what is meant by the term “limousine liberal.” A corollary is that it is a means of establishing rank, of demonstrating to the world that they are not like the ugly Americans and Babbitts and Archie Bunkers of the world, in spite of their money and expensive lifestyles.
There is something valid to that conclusion, I guess. But there is another angle that deserves to be explored. Have you noticed? Those who “blame America first” do not blame us first for everything we represent in the world arena. They don’t blame us for our dedication to feminist causes. They are critical of Third World countries that keep their women in second-class status, in veils and deprived of access to abortion on demand.
They also scold Asian and African nations that engage in censorship or deny members of the press the freedom they enjoy in the United States and western Europe. Muslim countries in Africa get heat more for the way they limit access to reporters and oppose the homosexual revolution than for the way they persecute Christian minorities.
Those who blame America first also do not include American environmental activists in their condemnations. True, Brazilians who chop down every tree they can find in the Amazon basin and Africans who poach endangered species are criticized less harshly than American logging companies and hunters. But they are criticized. The message is always that the poverty of the Third World despoilers should be taken into account when we judge their environmental misdeeds. But, nonetheless, the message is clear: The American environmentalists are right in pointing out the errors of their ways to the residents of the Third World. Their misdeeds are misdeeds. It is just that they know not what they do. Environmental activists are not ugly Americans, acting upon ethnocentric presumptions. No problems with any white man’s burden in this case.
My point is that “liberal guilt” should not be entirely attributed to some discomfort wealthy white entertainers and academics experience over having “so much” while “so much of the world goes to bed hungry.” That analysis lets the liberals off the hook. It fails to take into account the ideological bias that is at work in framing their expressions of guilt; it gives too much weight to some humanitarian impulse brought on by compassion for the downtrodden.
If compassion is what causes liberal guilt, why does it show itself only when it can further the secular liberal agenda? One would think that Christians slaughtered in the Sudan deserve some compassion, just as did Christians persecuted in Communist countries during the Cold War. But the message from the left was that we were not the “policeman of the world” when those issues came up. We were told that it was “simplistic” to picture the Soviets as an “evil empire.” Why is there more outrage in the press over the Saudi’s denying women equal rights, than over Fidel Castro denying them to everyone? Why more sympathy for the victims of female circumcision in the Sudan than for the millions who lost their lives in the Soviet gulags?
I don’t know who coined the phrase “selective indignation,” but it certainly fits here. Liberal guilt rises to the surface only in the name of certain causes. Maybe I am being overly cynical, but it often seems to me more a Machiavellian than a humanitarian impulse.
